Battle for Olustee

Greetings, this week the interns were tasked with reviewing the current literature surrounding the Lost Cause narrative and, more specifically, the Battle of Olustee. The Lost Cause, named after Edward A. Pollards book The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (1866), twists the narrative of the Confederacy to include States' Rights as the focus of the Civil War, rather than the preservation of slavery. Additionally, the Lost Cause has come to include chivalric imagery regarding Confederate soldiers and generals, which distorts and whitewashes their memory. In modern times the Lost Cause appeared forcefully around the turn of the twentieth century. Founded in 1894, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) chartered themselves as a "Historical, Benevolent, Educational, Memorial and Patriotic" organization seeking to preserve the "shared" memory of the Civil War. While this is appealing in writing, the UDC has acted contrary to its...

Greetings, my name is Jacob Finegan and I've studied history and archaeology at the University of Central Florida. My interest in history stems from a deep appreciation of our modern and digital world. The present will always be the best moment to study the past; new innovations in memory-making and in methodology are always being refined with increasingly accurate scientific instruments. Even for historians, whose sources are typically written documents, the conservation of place, landscape, and memory is taking a greater stake in the narrative than ever before. In the past, my research included Near Eastern empires, landscapes/border definitions, and frontier dynamics. Now, it revolves around the American memory of the Civil War, the Lost Cause, and modern questions regarding the role of the US Colored Troops (USCT), the Battle of Olustee, and their right to recognition.  My internship with the UCF Community Veterans History Project (UCF-VHP) will focus on the Battle of Olustee, ...